Cook County was in a jam. It needed to increase three operations: 1) the level of customer service to its citizens; 2) its system capacity for employees of County departments and hospitals; and 3) its ability to handle after-hours inquiries. It needed to all this without hiring additional personnel. So how did it do it? For starters it deployed an Avaya IPT Contact Center over a private network, layered with Avaya and Accuvoice Self Service applications to give callers 24/7 access to County information and databases. To facilitate higher levels of productivity and flexibility among County employees, Cook County deployed an Avaya Mobility Solutions. To find out how Cook County stayed on budget and increased services download this paper.

This paper provides a roadmap to break down the communication silos that dominate the industry and push it toward a new service-oriented communications architecture approach. The paper defines service oriented architecture or SOA and its new role in creating communications-enabled business process. The paper addresses Session Initiation Protocol or SIP as the new industry standard linking multiple end-point devices and how SIP fits into a new framework of service-oriented communications. The paper does a great job at using sports metaphors to communicate key ideas and concepts. This is one of the best papers on SIP and SOA, download it now using the link above.

Tags: "Developer Application" Posted in Avaya | Comments Off on The Path to Intelligent CommunicationsService Oriented Communications and SIP in the Contact Center and across the Enterprise

While IP telephony deployment growth rates are doubling every year and projected to get even stronger in 2007, thanks to Microsoft´s Unified Communications, IP contact centers have lagged. Contact center managers are all too aware that they are at the epicenter of customer contact and are fearful of unreliable, unmanageable and un-interoperable systems impacting corporate performance. But how much of this fear is justifiable? Contact center manager´s fears are being tested by a new wave of IP telephony contact centers entering the market equipped to address changing business requirements and booster reliability. Companies such as Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel, Syntellect, Aspect Software, Genesys Telecommunications, NEC and others are promoting SIP-based IP contact centers as a means to lower operational cost, improve agent responsiveness and reporting.

Voice business solutions involve menu-driven processes that allow customers to perform a wide range of self-service activities. A key requirement for successfully implementing and maintaining these business solutions is the ability to test them before and after they have been deployed, in order to confirm they work as designed. To thoroughly test the solution, every path a customer can take, including those associated with entry errors, must be tested. Within the industry, this kind of testing is referred to by many different names including, ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨unit level testing," ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨feature testing," ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨function testing," ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨regression testing," ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨flow testing" or ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨dialog traversal testing." The purpose of this white paper is to discuss the testing requirement as it relates to voice business solutions. IQ Services refers to this type of testing as ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨Feature/Function Testing."

The contact center agent is the first and sometimes the only contact a customer may have with the company. In today´s environment of increasingly demanding consumers and ever tighter profit margins, many organizations have become dependant on their contact centers to generate revenue or to maintain customer loyalty through the provision of efficient and effective customer service. Even with these high level strategic objectives as the main drivers for the contact center itself, there is often a lack of detailed attention given to how agents perform specific tasks and whether or not they have the correct tools at their disposal to make sure the contact center achieves its overall objectives as efficiently as possible. This white paper looks at the vital role the contact center agent plays in customer service and examines how the provision of accurate, timely and relevant information via the desktop PC can impact the overall efficiency of the contact center.

Tags: "Developer Application" Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on What the Agent Sees: A Critical Component for Contact Center Effectiveness

Converged applications have been positioned as entirely new applications that were not possible before IP telephony. In reality, the applications that offer the highest value to IP telephony are existing phone applications and call-control functions that have been redesigned to take advantage of these new IP telephones and converged infrastructure as well as computers and wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs. This white paper will show that the real value of IP telephony applications is not in over-hyped, ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨whiz-bang," industry-specific applications, but rather because it centers on delivering existing telephony applications and call-control functions with vastly improved usability.

Over the past three years, the discussion of IP telephony has transitioned from ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨what is it?" and ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨how does it work?" toward ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨why should I use it?" The purpose of this paper is to answer the more specific question, ?¬¢‚Äö√á¬®?√¨Why should I use VoIP and IP telephony in the contact center?" The compelling value of IP telephony is not just about creating converged networks with its toll (long-distance) call avoidance and simpler Moves, Adds, and Changes (MACs). The significant business value is in a continuum of contact center solutions that include: Voice Server Consolidation, Virtual Site Consolidation, Enterprise Resource Optimization and Contact Center Globalization.
All of these solutions cost justify themselves in stand-alone implementations. However, the true power to alter business fundamentals is unleashed when these solutions are deployed in combination across the solution continuum. Find out how by downloading this white paper.